Once The Iron Claw populates its first half with peppy needle drops, seaty training montages and brotherly bonding, the pivot toward death and heartache becomes all the more wrenching.

Red Cliff is a dichotomous beast: The computer-generated imagery that makes so much of it possible is served up in heaping, state-of-the-art portions, but the results occasionally border on the cartoonish. At the same time, Red Cliff is a classic tale that gets a classicist's treatment.

(Stamp and Fonda's) polar-opposition in acting styles and temperament, their cultural differences and their pop-cultural synergy come together with almost delicious cacophony.

Autism aside, writer-director Rachel Israel’s debut film is a fairly typical, low-budget New York romance, complete with an excursion to Coney Island. What distinguishes it are Israel’s empathetic characterizations — she’s known Polansky for 15 years — and the winning performances, not only by the leads but also by the supporting players.

Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.

The combined impact of these scenes, augmented with Robinson’s lecture — which, while deeply informed and informative, is anything but dull or academic — makes for a powerful one-two punch.

If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.

This is the rare military drama that conveys both the graphic physical effects of war and its lingering psychic cost.

Down in the Delta is as savory as a slowly stirred gumbo, a heartfelt saga of family and forgiveness directed by America's best-loved living poet, Maya Angelou. The spices are plentiful and the taste complex, but there's nothing fancy about this cultural icon's down-home cooking. [25 Dec 1998, p.C01]

Frantz contains revelations unrelated to the manner in which it protects, and then peels away, its central mystery. Ultimately, it addresses the question: Why go on living when life itself betrays us?

In this engrossing and ultimately inspiring examination of ideals in action, the team behind The Fight wind up illustrating a cardinal rule of nonfiction filmmaking: When it comes to humanizing even the loftiest principles, a documentary lives or dies by its principals.

Creadon and his editor, Douglas Blush, add verve to an otherwise talky exercise by cutting Wordplay as if it were a puzzle itself, with Across and Down camera moves and blocks of black space. A visual pun altogether worthy of those being filled in on screen.

Like Father, Like Son grows on you, subtly and over time. Just as with the unexpected realignments forced on its characters, it may be difficult to fall in love with the movie, but eventually you do warm up to it.

Filmworker is a tribute to the unsung artisans, assistants, best boys and girl Fridays whose indelible contributions make movies not just possible, but magical.

The movie is a stunning example of collaborative fidelity and artistry directed by Karel Reisz, and its impact may be heightened if one is in the dark as to the plot of its literary source, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Suddenly you find yourself in the grip of an overwhelming cinemate and melodramatic undertow, at once thrilled, astonished and dreadfully uncertain of where it may set you down. [09 Aug 1978, p.B1]

Subtlety isn’t the strong suit of Queen of Katwe. But beneath the hackneyed aphorisms, there’s a thrilling story worthy of our attention.

Filmmaker Kirsten Tan riffs on the tropes of both the buddy film and the road trip movie in her absurd yet subtly observed feature debut Pop Aye.

A fascinating experiment that, if the viewer is willing to surrender to Haynes's sometimes hermetic meditations on Dylan's life, heartily rewards the investment.

Malkovich and Sinise, who worked together in Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre (which Sinise co-founded), are touching and pleasurable together. Malkovich's portrayal of big, simple naif Lennie will attract the most attention, yet he is remarkably restrained, skirting the dangerous fence between verisimilitude and sheer ham. But Sinise, in the quieter, caretaking role, achieves at least as much.

Design-wise, the “Inside Out” characters are Pixar’s crudest work, with the blocky colors and stiff hair of a creature in a TV commercial for insecticide. Blown up to the big screen, they just look worse. Narratively, however, the film’s portrait of Joy is beautifully complex.

The Australian director John Hillcoat makes an audacious, unsettling American feature debut with The Proposition, a revisionist western that brings its own brand of sanguinary honesty to the genre.

The dance between authenticity and storymaking works beautifully.

A deceivingly simple film, one that grows in power in retrospect, as the cumulative impact of so many quiet moments makes itself felt.

It's the latest and one of the best entries in a genre whose highest philosophical expression is the whiplash realization that the universe doesn't play fair.

I had some trouble with the plot, but I'm not the only one -- so did the screenwriter.

In Milan Kundera's novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the characters are pawns on a complex, philosophical chessboard with Kundera's didactic commentary accompanying every move. In his adaptation, director Phil Kaufman films the pawns, even many of the moves. But without Kundera's connecting presence and voice, the result is closer to Chinese checkers than chess...Very attractive and watchable checkers, sure

King of Comedy aggravates the problem it's supposed to illuminate. Far from clarifying the nature of a creepy social pathology, the movie assumes an attitude of smug, unjustified superiority toward every character in sight and the cockeyed spectacle of pop culture in general.

It’s an unexpectedly charming diversion — a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and center.